Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Black Bean Soup

When I was
leafing through ¡Cuba! –
Recipes and stories from the Cuban Kitchen, I was reminded how
much I like black bean soup. In theory, black bean soup is just a dark
bowl of beans and doesn’t sound all that exciting. Which is probably why
I hadn’t made it in a while. Also black beans aren’t that easy to come by
in France. There are lots of wonderful beans in France – haricots
Tarbais, flageolets, and haricots de
Soissons, but the cultures (and cuisines) that use black beans
don’t necessarily skew with French cuisine, hence their paucity.

Black beans
have a particularly rich flavor, much more so than others beans, and lend
themselves to being paired with ingredients that have a lot of pizzazz,
like peppers, tomatoes, cilantro, and tangy sour cream. You have to dig a
little deeply to find them, so I was grateful when I was on book tour and
someone handed me a bag of Rancho
Gordo black beans. (Thanks to the woman who gifted them to
me!) When I got home, I couldn’t wait to use them. I’d been looking for a
reason to revisit this soup, that’s a favorite of mine, and here it was –
or is.